WordPress.com Business Users: Ecommerce has Arrived!

We’re thrilled to announce that, starting today, WordPress.com Business users can connect their sites to their online stores. With three leading ecommerce partners to choose from — Ecwid, Shopify, and ShopLocket (Update: ShopLocket is no longer an ecommerce partner on WordPress.com)– you can showcase, promote, and sell products to your customers directly from your site.

If you’re already a WordPress.com Business user, or are thinking of becoming one, here’s how the ecommerce feature will power your WordPress.com site.

A simple, hassle-free connection

Users with the WordPress.com Business upgrade already enjoy great features like live-chat support, unlimited storage, and free access to all our premium themes. Now, you can turn your site into a sleek online storefront, and let visitors shop from any post or page. The partners we’ve teamed up with — Ecwid, Shopify, and ShopLocket — all provide a smooth and secure ecommerce experience for you and your customers.

Connecting to your store is quick and easy — you initiate the process on your Dashboard, by going to eCommerce Plugins, where you can select the desired service:

After activating the service you’d like to use, you can go to the service’s Settings page to complete any necessary account details — from your Dashboard, go to Settings → Service Name (i.e. Ecwid Store, Shopify, or ShopLocket). In case you don’t already have an online store, you’ll be able to create one from the Settings page. (If you’ve ever used Publicize to connect your site to any social media platform like Facebook or Twitter, this process, which is very similar, will be a breeze).

Turn your site into a tailor-made storefront

Once your WordPress.com Business site is connected to your online store, the possibilities are endless. Each service is slightly different, but you can feature your products by simply embedding a link to your product into the editor, pasting in a shortcode from the services’ dashboard/admin, or, in some cases, just copying over the embed code into the editor. Regardless of the method you choose, we’ll automatically convert each link into a sleek, professional product image.

If you’d like more control over your site’s visuals, you can tweak your products’ appearance even further. You can modify the look and feel of the products on your page by customizing the shortcode, from image size and background color to “Buy” button text. Depending on the ecommerce service you’re using, you can add products to your sidebar with a designated widget, or even have a shopping cart on your page.

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31 Comments

This is a terrific and welcome addition to my Business hosting on WordPress.com. Thank you for taking the next great leap in blogging/web/social media with the ease and official support of the WP.com staff and backend services.

This update not only makes WP.com easier to use, but more robust and brutally specific on your side in the marketplace of ideas and tasks.

It’s incredibly exciting to see WordPress.com offer eCommerce, but a real shame to see the many excellent open-source options snubbed (including those built specifically for WordPress).

I understand the many very good reasons why it makes sense to partner with existing hosted services, but I hope that one day, we’ll see WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads (EDD) and other open-source eCommerce options alongside these initial launch partners.

Matt has long said “WordPress.com is a gateway drug for WordPress.org”.

It’s an asset to the platform that if a blogger outgrows the limited features available on WordPress.com, they can seamlessly move off to create their own WordPress.org site and be free to do whatever they can dream of with their site.

Choosing these 3 partners for eCommerce means WordPress.com users will not have that same freedom once their store out-grows the service they started on.

Yes! The ecommerce plugins are now an integral part of the WordPress.com Business upgrade, with no additional charge to use them on our end. Please note, however, that there may be additional fees charged by Ecwid and Shopify to use these services.

I’m looking for a solution to give a no-profit blog readers the opportunity to make donation or pay for services and goods using directly their credit card. Could this be a solution? Sorry to ask, I’m not technical savvy, I already have the codes for a bank, but I’d like much better to remain with WP, at least I learned enough to blog…

To enable readers to make a donation or send a payment through your site, the easiest and simplest solution (which is also free) would be to embed a PayPal donation button (instructions on how to do that are in the linked support page). Of course, the ecommerce plugins can achieve the same thing if you’re offering a wider selection of products and services. The best solution would vary depending on your specific needs.